jeheald 

It may be possible to make money as a retail trader scalping the spread on the ES, but I've never seen it done successfully.

I agree with you on that jeherald. Mathematically trading the ES spread just doesn't make much sense. In a practical sense, 3 ticks minimum, 4 or even 5 ticks gives some breathing room with a more realistic stop loss.

Anyone that wants to learn a proven method to scalp 4 ticks in the ES, I would suggest reading these two excellent trading journals here on nexusfi.com (formerly BMT)...

Day Trading Using the Basis of Mack's PAT Teachings Hello futures.io (formerly BMT), I am trading in Sim the ES where the basis of my trading is Mack's price action trading teachings. He has a website and a youtube channel where he goes over the day. He lets you know where the good trades were and …

Day Trading the ES PATS style- 1 point at a time Okay Here goes- I have been hanging out Hijacking Evans PATS thread for a while now and it's time I grew a pair and created my own journal I guess. I first got interested in trading when my wife dragged me to a 4Xmadeasy seminar in 2004. $3000 …

FYI traders at prop firms doing volume will have c. 40c RTs on ES. Most use some form of averaging.

Another problem with this strategy is in a fast moving market, you won't even get fill confirmations until you're > 20 ticks offside.

You could try exploring your strategy on a thinner market where queue position isn't so important

jadynb 

Another problem with this strategy is in a fast moving market, you won't even get fill confirmations until you're > 20 ticks offside. You could try exploring your strategy on a thinner market where queue position isn't so important

Not sure what market your even talking about. With a good broker/order routing service fill confirmations for the ES are on the order of milliseconds. ES and "fast moving market" should never appear in the same sentence